Gold for June delivery at the COMEX division of the CME added $6.10 to settle at $1,564.90 an ounce. The gold price traded as high as $1,568.10 and as low as $1,553 an ounce, while the spot price was climbing $1.40, according to Kitco's gold index.

"Yesterday's price action confirmed that the bears are in near-term technical command," said Jim Wyckoff, senior metals strategist at Kitco.com. "When you see a big price move in a market, many times the following day you'll see a pause just as traders catch their breath."

Gold was trading flat Thursday as weekly jobless claims suggested a sideways move. Although weekly claims for the week ended April 6 fell by 42,000 to 346,000, the four-week moving average ticked higher by 3,000 from the previous week to 358,000. Gold prices often move inversely to positive and negative economic data in the labor market as the Federal Reserve has committed to keeping the short-term federal funds rate exceptionally low at least until the U.S. unemployment rate dips to 6.5%.

"The March FOMC meeting came before the March employment report; a lot of the presumption or the notion of starting to scale back either by mid-year or before year-end was based on continued numbers like we had been seeing -- and remember we had very strong U.S. economic data in January and February," Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas, said in an interview.